A cartoonist once depicted an announcement from proud Jewish parents proclaiming the birth of their child. The card proclaimed the name of the baby “Dr. ______.” Perhaps I was not born a doctor, as the cartoon implied, but my curious adventures in medicine certainly began that early.
I was delivered by a veterinarian. I doubt that this was what my mother intended when she went to the hospital to give birth to me, but I was a breech baby, the family doctor was having a hard time and the specialist on duty, who happened to be in the building, also happened to be a veterinarian. In spite of the implications of entering the world ass-backward at the hands of a horse doctor, I’ve always felt lucky: after all, it might’ve been a dentist.
This was in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1930. Charleston is one of the most interesting and beautiful cities in America. It has been the home of the largest Jewish community of colonial times, with roots going back to the 1690s; an early commercial center with a very cosmopolitan, cultured atmosphere; an important location in the War Between the States, from the firing on Fort Sumter that launched the war to the city’s capture by Union forces four years later. Charleston has survived economic depressions and economic revivals, a major earthquake in 1886 and several powerful hurricanes.
My father, Milton Banov, was born here, as was his mother. They were part of the tightly knit Jewish community, which by the 1930s had been greatly enlarged by recent immigrants from Eastern Europe, including my grandfathers. In Jewish Charleston, to have a grandmother who was born here was rare. We went back quite far. My father was very proud of the family’s history here and he was very proud of being American. I have inherited his love of Charleston’s history as well as his frustrated aspirations to be its official tour guide.
There was always one doctor in the Jewish community. He was the one who performed circumcisions, deliveries and so forth. But for less dire or less expensive medical help, the immigrants went to my grandfather, Sam Banov.
Sam Banov was a sort of quasi-doctor; he had no medical training, but he did have a big medical book. People came to his clothing store with their complaints. He consulted the book and then gave them various medicines.
One time, somebody came in with what turned out to be an inflamed appendix. My grandfather prescribed a laxative and the appendix ruptured. Grandfather was so distraught that the surgeon (the aforementioned Jewish doctor) brought my grandfather into the operating room to let him see that the fellow was all right. But Grandfather was very upset about having missed the diagnosis; that may have been when he stopped practicing medicine and relegated the big medical book to the attic.
As a teenager, I discovered the book and spent hours up there, absorbed in reading it. The big book may have led to my interest in homegrown research experiments. I remember in high school I hid various types of weeds under my father’s pillow and then made a scientific record of his sneezing the next morning.
Even before that time, doctors and medicine held my interest. My childhood stories included Dr. Doolittle in books, Dr. Kildare in the movies and Dr. Christian in the early 1940s radio show. When I was seven years old, I found an injured turtle in the park. Since these were the pre-EMS years, I transported the animal in the luxurious facility of my back pocket. I took the turtle down to my office in the basement and performed major, and probably innovative, surgical procedures, which saved the turtle’s life—or so I thought. My complex medical therapy consisted of applying, with just the right touch, a mixture of Mercurochrome and iodine. The frightened turtle finally projected his head from the shell, and I believed that I was responsible for a medical miracle. But, as I was to learn on many occasions in the future, patients—and turtles—often get well despite their doctors. It was probably not until college, when I took a course in comparative anatomy, that I began to question whether my ministrations to this turtle were as lifesaving as I thought. The turtle never let on.
Charleston back in those days was a comfortable, predictable city, easy to live in. My life was bound by the social conventions and religious obligations of the Jewish community, as well as those of a segregated Southern state.
I spent a lot of time at the library, partly because of the wonderful librarian Janey Smith (known to us as Miss Janey), who looked just like a librarian in the movies, with glasses and her hair in a bun. But even if I might have been a bit of what’s now called a nerd, I still had to fight. Fighting was a big part of being a Southern schoolboy in those days. Bullies ruled the schoolyard, and the teachers encouraged these confrontations. When we had fights, we were sent to the gymnasium and the whole school was called to witness it. It happened to me.
Two brothers, notorious bullies, always picked on me when I left school on my bicycle in the afternoon. I put up with this for a few months until one day, when they threw my bike down as usual. I said, “Did you throw my bike down?” and one of the brothers said, “Yeah. What are you going to do about it?” I fought him immediately, and won. The next day I fought the other brother. I had to do this for three or four days, alternating brothers, with the whole school watching. When I got home I tried to hide my hands, which were swollen from fighting. I used liniment on them all weekend because I knew I’d have to come back Monday and fight again. It was hard, but after that they left me alone. Many years later, I heard that one of them grew up to be a prizefighter and the other was convicted of murder. Had I been able to peek into the future, perhaps I wouldn’t have taken them on.
My friends were the other Jewish boys in town, who I met in school or at synagogue. I can’t say that fighting bullies (or ministering to myself in the aftermath) made me want to become a doctor, but growing up in an atmosphere of high regard for professionals, with medicine as the pinnacle of all professions, certainly had its influence.
As Jews, we always knew we were different. In Charleston, this was even more the case: in spite of our long history there, we were neither part of white Charleston society nor of the equally historical black community. As the other communities pretty much kept to themselves, so did we.
Both my grandfather and my father were storekeepers in the poorer sections of town. A certain level of crime was endemic. There were gangs then, as now, which came in, took things off the shelves and disrupted the business. My grandfather was told he should defend himself. Most Jewish immigrants in those days were gentle people when it came to physical actions; they didn’t fight back. But the other merchants said it was the only thing he could do. They gave him a blackjack, which was a club covered with leather and small enough to keep hidden. The next person who came in and bothered him, my grandfather just went at him with the blackjack. He never had another problem with the gangs. I inherited his blackjack. I like to think his spirit came down to me too, and helped me defeat those schoolyard bullies.
I encountered few black people in my younger years. We had a maid, Susie Gathers, who lived on Moultrie Street, four or five houses down from us. She used to babysit me, which meant that she sat on the edge of my bed and stayed there until my parents came home. She used to plan all our meals and do the cooking, and we didn’t find out until just a few months before she died that she was illiterate. She had a daughter who was the same age as my younger sister Linda, and the two grew up together as friends. They didn’t recognize any difference between themselves until they got into their teens. They went to different, segregated schools. Society began teaching them its lessons, and it became obvious that the world would not offer the same opportunities to both. They stayed friends, but only marginally.
Growing up Jewish may have heightened my sensitivity to other aspects of Charleston without my realizing it. I was probably about fifteen years old, and Rosa Parks’s act of defiance of the typical segregation laws of the South was still a decade in the future, when one day I boarded a city bus to go downtown. A few stops later, an elderly black woman climbed, with difficulty, the front steps of the bus and began her walk to the back, the “colored” section, which for her was a considerable distance. I was sitting close to the front; there was an empty seat next to me. As she came toward me, I said, “Come sit by me,” and helped her into the vacant third-row seat. My action didn’t seem extraordinary to me. My father had instilled a respect for elders that did not recognize racial boundaries or, apparently, legal ones. By offering her a seat at the front of the bus, I helped a little old lady break the law.
About two blocks later, the driver stopped the bus and, with real anger, made me get out. As I trudged home, I was scared to death of what my father’s reaction might be. It wasn’t that I’d never been in trouble, but somehow this brush with authority felt more serious than anything that had happened before.
I hadn’t noticed that one of our neighbors (a retired marine corps colonel, and as redneck as they come) had been on the bus with me and witnessed the entire incident. There was plenty of time during my long walk home for him to call my father and tell him about his smart-ass kid, who the driver had wisely thrown off the bus as a lesson for the future. He thought my father would want to commend the driver.
But he didn’t know my father, a true Southern gentleman without a prejudiced bone in his body. As I approached the house my dread increased with every step. It doubled when I spotted my father walking briskly from the backyard with the same stern face he’d had when I was caught a year earlier selling illegal firecrackers. He grabbed me fiercely by the shoulders. I saw tears in his eyes, felt a tremor through his hands and was sure he was angrier with me than he’d ever been in his life. Then I found myself enveloped in a huge bear hug and heard him utter one word, the best a son can hear from a father: “Mensch!”
We never mentioned the incident again.
For those of us who were children in the 1940s and too young for the military, the decade was a period of intense patriotism. Before Pearl Harbor, sailors from the Charleston Naval Base were rarely welcomed to respectable Charleston homes. Families might attend parties with servicemen, but their daughters were not encouraged to date them. All of this changed on December 7, 1941. Suddenly, everyone in uniform was a hero, and our homes were opened to those who had previously been called “nasty, beer-drinking sailors”; now they were son-in-law material.
We followed World War II as if it were a football series. Clearly, we were the good guys, winning exciting battles on land, on sea and in Saturday-afternoon, nine-cent movies. The bad guys were easily identified, not just by their black hats, but also because they were so ugly compared to the white hats such as Clark Gable and James Stewart. For the first two years of the war, I basked in the thrills and comradeship of watching military parades and singing patriotic songs on Charleston streets. Perhaps our token sacrifices of rationed gasoline and allowances of two pairs of new shoes a year helped me think that I was sharing the fight with all of the other kids of the world.
But medicine and war had a way of intersecting in my life more than once. If I believed in omens, I might have spotted some unseen hand (besides my mother’s) steering me in the direction of a medical career.
When I was a twelve-year-old camper at a Boy Scout camp near Charleston, a large group of us took advantage of an unusually low tide to wade into the mud of a tidal creek in search of fiddler crabs. Suddenly, the beach around the pluff mud resembled the Normandy invasion. Practically every camper, including me, was lacerated by hidden, very sharp oyster shells. It was a bloody beachhead!
Unknown to my fellow campers and especially my school friends (to whom I did not want to appear to be a sissy), I had attended a special civil defense course with my mother. I had learned about the application of pressure on wounds to stop bleeding and about how to organize a group of casualties into self-help units so that they could assist each other until medical help arrived. Because the Red Cross instructor was reluctant to have a child in his adult course, my mother had to plead to get me admitted. In the end, he was no match for the intensity of my mother’s passion to groom me to be a doctor.
Down on the beach, I set to work. With towels, sheets and any other makeshift dressing, I got my fellow campers’ bleeding under control. The camp director, who had been in Charleston attending a meeting, returned about then, and although concerned about the mishap, he was also relieved and surprised that the “mess” had been handled by one of his twelve-year-old Scouts. He was probably most worried about drawing criticism for lax supervision.
They say that everyone has his fifteen minutes of fame. As a result of the “action on the beach,” as someone called it, I was given special recognition at the annual Boy Scout banquet some months later. Since there was no appropriate medal for a child directing a beach rescue activity, I was awarded a lapel pin meant for medical professionals for outstanding medical services to the Boy Scouts of America.
I loved that pin and was extremely proud of it, especially since it had the caduceus on it. I must have gazed at that pin every hour, right through the night. My mother could relax now—I was hooked on medicine.
About three months later, I received a telephone call from the regional director of the Boy Scouts. It was about that pin. The local branch had made an error; the pin could only be given to a real physician and I would have to return it. Instead, the regional director would give me a more practical gift—a wristwatch with a second hand, something that was still relatively new in the world. I would certainly be the only kid on my block to have a green Boy Scout wristwatch, but I wanted my pin!
I surrendered it to the regional director and received my obviously expensive watch in return. I hoped no one saw the tears in my eyes.
To this day, each morning when I search for my socks in my dresser drawer I come upon a box filled with useless lapel pins, given during a lifetime of personal and professional community service. I’d be happy to throw them all away, and probably will one of these days. No matter what kind of recognition I’ve received in whatever form, I would have preferred to have that little pin with the symbol of the physician. It was another ten years before I became eligible to wear it, but I was never again given the chance.
When I was about fifteen years old and started to read sections of the newspaper other than the comics, I began to understand that people were getting hurt in this war and perhaps I should be doing more for the war effort than collecting old rubber tires. My adventuresome cousin Norman Arnold and I hatched a plan to stow away on a hospital ship, save lives and help win the war, all without any danger of getting hurt ourselves, of course. Our elaborate plans consumed about one hour on the morning of our caper and included such logistics as the preparation of three corned beef sandwiches apiece.
A few bottles of Coke and a Baby Ruth candy bar were added to carry us through the transatlantic crossing to the battlefields. Missing from our strategic planning was the idea of notifying our parents. That was unimportant; they’d read all about it in the papers. If we had to miss school, too bad! We were vague in our own minds about what services we would perform on the ship. My medical skills were still limited to reading Grandpa Banov’s book and practicing on that turtle. And since neither of us would consent to helping our families around the house, we would be no good at swabbing decks.
Hospital ships are impressive-looking vessels—painted white, with massive red crosses on the decks. We had visited the Charleston Naval Shipyard many times and knew exactly where to locate the hospital ships that were in for repair. Admittance to the shipyard was easy—all one had to do was not look German or Japanese. Looking Japanese wasn’t a problem. We were certain we’d never be taken for German spies because we knew that all Germans looked like Adolph Hitler and had his funny haircut. So, with perfect confidence, we simply walked up the gangplank and onto the ship. Two armed guards thought it was nice that we were delivering sandwiches to our uncle. We were so convincing that they never bothered to ask his name.
We decided to hide out in a large, extremely clean section of a room that did, upon reflection, seem a bit isolated. In fact, it was the poison gas decontamination unit. Any crewmember coming upon us there would not doubt for a minute that we were out of bounds, and that’s what happened not long after we arrived.
The captain was on leave, so we were taken to the executive officer. Fortunately for us, the exec had children of his own—six, in fact—none with any imagination. So he gave us a guided tour with all the flourishes, a tour usually reserved for visiting navy or political brass. The day finished with an invitation to the mess hall for dinner.
Everyone was so friendly that I was beginning to think about the next military facility we might unofficially visit. Then our host showed us one last room, which surprised me because I didn’t know it existed on a hospital ship. It was the brig. The exec told us flatly that this would be our fate should we ever again set foot on any other ship in wartime without permission.
We didn’t.
I confess I hadn’t always wanted to become a doctor. What I really wanted to be when I grew up was a policeman or a detective. The movies and radio shows of the ’40s helped convince me. In those stories, policemen and detectives solved puzzles, pursued the truth and aided in the triumph of Good over Evil. But as a career path, law enforcement wasn’t my family’s first choice for me. In the years during and after World War II, Jewish families seemed to share a particular overriding aspiration for their sons—a profession that allowed them to be self-employed and not subject to the whims of an employer who might have anti-Semitic feelings. This meant medicine or law. My family was no different. It wasn’t until I had been a specialist for some years that I realized how much the field of allergy is like the detective business—the only difference, perhaps, is that the bad guys don’t shoot back.
I pursued my medical degree with the intensity of Dick Tracy hot on a criminal’s trail. At Emory University in Atlanta, I majored in Getting into Medical School, and I was not alone in that department.
The fraternities supported each other across college lines too. Although some of our joint activities were pure Animal House, we were not unaware of the serious political and social issues of the day. In fact, we felt them keenly. Civil rights, politics and the future of our country were topics of heated debate.
Those were the days of the Talmadge era: Governor Eugene Talmadge, with his trademark red suspenders, waving a shotgun and followed in office by his son, Herman Talmadge. Both men personified the rabid Southern segregationist. Those years saw the beginning of the battle between the federal government’s push to legislate and enforce fair employment practices, desegregation and civil rights, and the South’s fierce, often violent resistance. The battle continued for more than two decades.
In 1948, Henry Wallace, who had been vice president in the Roosevelt administration, ran for president on the Progressive Party ticket. He advocated an end to segregation, as well as voting rights for blacks. He came to Atlanta, amid many threats, to speak at a black church. We Emory students got in touch with some black students at Morehouse College. They helped us sneak past the angry picketers (who would likely have tarred and feathered any whites they caught entering the church) in order to hear Wallace speak.
For the black students, the threat of violence was nothing to ignore: the state of Georgia, along with Mississippi, led the nation in lynchings. Those were the days of the Ku Klux Klan and cross burnings. We wanted to help fight back, and actually attended a few cross burnings, bringing along our fraternity brothers, the big football players from the Georgia Tech chapter. Each of our boys stood next to a Klansman, looming over him as the evening progressed. It was meant as counter-intimidation, and it worked.
Most of the time, we studied and schemed. Those of us majoring in Med School (Getting In) were pathologically concerned about our grade point averages. What we really needed was an easy course (nonscientific, naturally) to boost that magic number. We decided to register for a Bible study class—how difficult could it be?
But there was a problem. While the average Christian student had enough familiarity with the Bible to guarantee an A with little effort, we Jewish pre-meds had stopped our religious education at our bar mitzvah, or at least at the end of the Old Testament.
To create equality in grading, we resorted to the age-old custom of buttering up the teacher. Mr. Julius Newman was a withdrawn, insecure missionary’s son who had spent twenty-five of his thirty years in the socially void confines of various Asian church schools. We invited him to dinner at our fraternity house, where he was introduced to the forbidden temptations of beer and pornography (the marijuana of the 1950s). Eventually he confided that not only was he a virgin, but he had never had a single date with a girl and didn’t even know how to begin a conversation on a nonreligious subject.
What an opportunity for us!
Mr. Newman was too honorable to repay our attention and friendship with an undeserved high grade, but he did agree to a trade: he would coach us, in a formal, remedial way, on what we needed to know to excel in the course. In return, we would teach him how to approach the innocent female instructor in his department. I can still see the blackboard in the fraternity house: on one side was a list of the apostles, on the other side our advice: “Touch her hand gently in the movie, but don’t put your arm around her until you get her in the car.”
Everyone in our fraternity who took the class made an honest A, and Mr. Newman invited the entire fraternity to his wedding. His wife never knew that he came to the fraternity house after each date for a critique of the evening. Our coaching ended with the wedding, but apparently we were the best of mentors: the couple went on to have four beautiful children, and he did that all on his own.
In my last year at Emory, I shared an apartment offcampus with a fellow pre-med student. Our landladies were two elderly sisters with tremendous maternal instincts, who would always bring us glasses of warm milk and sandwiches at night to encourage us as we studied.
My roommate and I were cramming for a final exam in comparative anatomy, one of those must-ace courses for any aspiring medical student. A main teaching tool for that course was an embalmed cat, well marked with latex strips labeling specific organs and blood vessels. Students were required to memorize its internal details. I decided to bring my cat back to my room so I could study all night. I was happy to see my milk and sandwich waiting for me on my desk.
Sitting at my desk at the far end of our room, my back was to the hallway door. That night the sweet little ladies came in to say goodnight. When they opened the door, all they could see was my back as I bent over my desk, with a cat head on the left, the cat’s legs sticking out on the right and the sound of my jaws working as I vigorously chewed my corned beef sandwich while using a probe to review the various parts of the cat’s anatomy.
The sweet little ladies survived the shock and claimed never to have believed for a second that I was eating a cat, but the next year they began renting the room exclusively to theology students. I got an A on the final.
Atlanta is 340 miles from Charleston, but it might have been across the ocean in the view of a callow teenager. In Atlanta I grew up quickly. Still, there was a lot to learn about the way the world worked.
I was taking a political science course and was casting around for a term paper topic. It’s no surprise that at that point my academic interest intersected my other burning interest—dancing to the tune played by my raging hormones. And, although I was then in college, I must have still wanted to be a policeman. When the course required me to interview someone in government, I chose the police department.
Atlanta was not unusual among big cities in having a well-established sex industry that catered to all ages and interests. (As I was to discover, my own hometown had a fine tradition in this regard.) Fraternity boys were a major source of revenue in certain Atlanta brothels that specialized in relieving these kids of their virginity.
I went to the police department and, in the course of the interview, informed the inspector that prostitution existed in his city. He said he knew it.
“But there are numerous establishments operating in full view of the authorities, who must be bribed to look the other way. They’re corrupting the morals of minors,” I told them.
“Really?” replied the inspector, looking astonished.
I offered my services as an undercover detective. He accepted. For the next few weeks, I “investigated” the brothels of Atlanta, on behalf (I thought) of Emory University and the Atlanta Police Department. Two or three times I reported my findings to a grateful (I thought) police department. When my work became known to the world at large, I would be famous (I thought).
Then the dean called me into his office. The police department had had enough of me, apparently, and the inspector told the dean to get this kid out of their hair. The dean explained the real facts of life to me: you don’t expose corruption in Atlanta.
I got an A on the term paper, although to my surprise it didn’t make me famous. And they had a big laugh in the police department.
For me, college was a trade school. I spent my four years training to be a medical school applicant, instead of acquiring a true liberal arts education, or learning to think about the world. In college, I learned to do surgery on a grasshopper, but I haven’t been called upon to do that in the more than fifty years since. Nor did the experience enlarge my understanding of the world or help make me a good person. That was my loss. Pre-med students are entitled to a wonderful, well-rounded education in all disciplines, especially the humanities. In the end, it will make them better doctors.
In 1951, my last year at Emory, the finish line was in sight. It wasn’t hard to handicap the medical school horse race: few girls were ever accepted, blacks never were and at the Medical College of South Carolina, there was an unwritten but obvious rule that limited the number of Jewish applicants accepted. For the past one hundred years there were usually two, but occasionally up to four, Jews accepted in any class. Every bright, Jewish, pre-med student in the state competed for those few places. This is quite different from the present time, as the school has a Jewish president and a Jewish dean of graduate studies. Although practically everybody I knew at Emory was pre-med, they would apply to different medical schools. I knew I was really competing only against the other South Carolina Jewish students.
As a backup, I had applied to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for a position as a fingerprint technician. This would provide some scientific training and satisfy my desire to be a policeman/detective/undercover agent.
It was the height of the Korean conflict and the military draft was operating full steam. If I made it into medical school, I’d be the hero of the day. If I didn’t make it, I’d be drafted. In fact, I’d already been drafted, but not yet called.
My medical school application had been submitted months before—it was probably the first one that the school received—but by May I still had not received a response. On a depressing Friday afternoon, after visiting my mailbox for another disappointing non-response, I received a telephone call from FBI headquarters requesting that I come down the next morning for a formal interview. With the fear of a Communist behind every bush, I assumed that the FBI screening process was very thorough. This seemed a strange way to schedule an interview—giving me only half a day to prepare and without sending a formal letter of request. Naturally, I suspected another Georgia Tech fraternity prank, but decided it must be the real thing.
The next morning I arrived at 8:30 a.m., expecting to see the very dramatic, efficient and massive FBI office. After all, Atlanta was the district headquarters for the bureau. Instead, I was ushered into a very small, compact room with two desks and two typewriters, complete with two unsmiling typists who were banging away at their machines. At first they hardly acknowledged me, but as time passed it became harder to ignore me. We were together all morning as I waited for my official interviewer. The two typists were as friendly as they could be under the awkward circumstances. They offered me a soft drink and inquired politely about my fraternity house, friends and schoolwork. They apologized profusely for the special agent, who never appeared.
Finally, after almost four hours of sitting in the cramped quarters and being asked a number of embarrassing questions, including some about my sex life, I was led into the district director’s office for my interview. When I opened the door, I saw dozens of desks, file cabinets and office machines clattering; about what I would expect for a major district FBI headquarters.
After I introduced myself, the director said, “Well, thanks very much for coming. You will hear from us.”
“But, sir,” I explained, “I’m supposed to have my interview.”
“Oh, you already had your interview,” he replied. “Four hours of it, by our two agents.” Two very well-trained agents, that is, posing as typists. Doubtless, they conducted one of the most candid interviews one could possibly have, and I fell for the entire scheme.
I must not have revealed anything too alarming though, as I was offered a position a few weeks later. But by then, my medical school acceptance had at last arrived, and my dream was realized. I would become a doctor.